5 Essential Online Shortcuts for Those Who Work Smart

We all know that hard work is a virtue. Our parents, time and time again, had taught us that the hardworking man is the man who goes far in life. Nowadays, however, with so many things to do and accomplish in so little time, working smart seems to be the better option of the two. This is the reason why life hacks – tricks, skills or shortcuts to increase efficiency and accelerate workflow – are increasing in popularity. And if you’re a regular shortcut hunter, here are online tools worth exploring:

After all is said and done, air travel is still the fastest and safest way to move around. If you are one with a black belt in frugality, you know that airlines started a war against price-comparison sites and now offer their cheapest tickets either through their own websites or only through agencies they have exclusive contracts with. So you go to Expedia and then Orbitz and compare their prices, then you go to United or Southwest Airlines’ site and check the prices they are quoting, until you find the price that’s really the lowest possible.

Well, you no longer need to visit several different airlines and ticket-selling sites. JetRadar.com is a new metasearch engine that crawls through databases of 35 ticket-selling agencies and 728 individual airlines, and makes it possible to find the lowest airfare using a single site.

If you are a business owner or a department head, you probably use or would like to use all kinds of software to increase productivity – CRM for handling sales and marketing, instant messaging to keep in touch with all employees, project management software to make sure things that need to be done get done in time, task scheduler or calendar to keep track of your own obligations and so on.

Bitrix24.com is here to save the day. With Bitrix24.com, you can do all this and more without installing anything. This is an online intranet system that’s accessible from any PC or smart phone anywhere in the world. Also, it’s 100% free if the size of your team is a maximum of 12 members. It’s hard to beat something that’s free and requires no installation.

Let’s face it – it’s the era of social media. Social media is increasingly becoming important in the field of business promotion, something businesses know for a fact. When talking about social media, however, it’s not just Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Foursquare. There are a good number of them vying for the greater audience’s attention. And chances are, more social media platforms will be introduced in the months and years to come, making managing through all of them challenging at best.

HootSuite.com is a social media management tool for organizations and businesses that allows you to control your social media campaigns from the convenience of one web-based dashboard. With HootSuite, you can launch campaigns, grow your audience, distribute targeted messages, streamline workflow, customize reports and more. HootSuite can be availed free or pro, which starts at $9.99 per month.

For a teacher, an architect or an engineer dealing with diagrams or charts on a regular basis to convey his messages, a flowcharting application is a godsend. It allows him to save energy, time, not to mention, money. Gliffy.com, whose origin can be traced from “glyph,” a word which essentially means a mark on written medium that adds value to the written text, is an online diagram application used to design floor plans, SWOT charts, network blueprints, organizational charts and other complicated technical layouts in the easiest manner possible. Gliffy offers both a free and paid service. The monthly standard subscription is pegged at $4.95 per user.

You open your e-mail, you need a password. You communicate with your contacts through Facebook or Twitter, you need a password. To disengage your alarm system, you need a password. To unlock your iPhone and talk to Siri about driving instructions, you need a password. Getting your significant other to go out on a date may even require a password. Everything nowadays is password-protected. Using the same password for multiple accounts is extremely dangerous, but when you use different passwords for different applications, it’s so easy to forget them. Writing them down on yellow Post-its is not so smart an idea, too.

LastPass.com can help. LastPass is a browser plug-in that syncs your data to any computer you use on a regular basis. Once all your data is stored, the last password you ever need to remember is your LastPass password.